At least now family life has sporting chance

Men paying attention to what women say when they go out together, rather than merely pretending to while looking over their shoulders at the TV set.

Children celebrated for more than their ability to report the fate of the inning's first batter during a particularly intensive sandwich construction.

These are shaping up to be lean months for Chicago sports fans, and thank goodness.

By the grace of the Cubs, the goat, the foul-ball obsessive fan and Jack McKeon, or some unholy combination thereof, there is not now the bother of World Series games to have to pay attention to, as many as seven of them, 3 1/2 hours at a time. Thank goodness.

The new-edition Bears are worth watching only if you also enjoy stepping on rakes with splintery handles. Praise be.

The Bulls appear in preseason to be their usual mediocre post-Michael selves, a team that will be lucky to win 33 of their 82 games. O happy day.

And the Blackhawks play hockey, a sport you are allowed to care about only if you are Canadian or toothless. All hail Canada!

Chicago, in other words, abounds with men who (will hate me for letting the secret out that they) now have free time, found time, time returned to them by the sports gods and their only occasionally interrupted disdain for this town.

Why is this a good thing? Because it gives me and people like me a chance to get out of the sports doghouse. The sports doghouse is a supremely stereotypical but all too real place inhabited by men, almost exclusively, who can't resist the lure of sports, usually televised sports.

I know it's a brilliant fall Sunday, Sweetie, and yes, I did graduate college and talk to you about novels and the outdoors on our early dates. But this is the American Express World Golf Championships. Big money. Tiger. The human drama of athletic competition.

Yes, I did use "athletic" and "golf" together. Yes, I am trying to tell you a tournament you've never heard of is essential. OK, well--cringe--have fun apple picking!

For a time you can get away with this. But eventually the significant other who isn't happy to leave you to your sloth, for reasons you probably don't want to know about, figures out that on the sports calendar, every weekend features a once-in-a-lifetime event. Many of them happen annually.

And you, called by the siren song of real-time drama, of a story that's written before your very eyes, are doomed to the threshold, if you have an iron will, or deep recesses, if you don't, of the sports doghouse.

A young man in a new relationship will plunge headlong into the doghouse every time, so sure that he is asserting some elemental manliness he does not realize how lonely it often is in there.

But over time, as one matures or at least grows more cunning, one learns to look for ways to avoid the little shack, shaped suspiciously like a couch with a blanket draped over it.

So now I ignore baseball, with its interminable and persnickety rituals, almost until the playoffs, when those rituals actually add to the tension.

Having been suckered too many times by blind loyalty, I have become an unapologetic fair-weather fan, following closely only those teams that show signs of rewarding the attention.

I now let envy join my pity for people who can ignore, say, a five-set U.S. Open tennis match under the lights.

I make rampant use of my TiVo, a supreme doghouse-avoidance tool that lets me record sports events; watch them, zipping through commercials, when it does not interfere with what spouses like to call "real life"; and sometimes even discover that I didn't really need to see that opening round of the Senior U.S. Open after all.

And I celebrate moments like this special one in Chicago, when circumstances conspire to keep mandatory sports consumption off the agenda, probably for the entire fall and winter.

So look for me at the orchard this weekend, Mr. Happy Family Fruit Picker, alert to the differences between "pie apples" and "eating apples" and never once breaking down to wail, "Five outs away! They were five outs away!"

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Columns by Tribune staff reporters Steve Johnson and Louise Kiernan, who are husband and wife, appear in this space on alternating weeks.